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We talk a lot about AI in marketing. How to transform teams. How to lead in the AI age. But sometimes the best lessons come from scrappy, down-to-earth examples. The kind that makes you laugh and then think, damn, that’s smart.
Take The Original Tamale Company, a small family-run shop in Los Angeles. They just pulled off a masterclass in viral marketing with almost no budget. Their “head of marketing” (probably a cousin or uncle, let’s be honest) spent maybe 10 minutes in ChatGPT writing a script. The result was a 46-second AI-assisted ad, shot on the cheap.
Three weeks later: 22 million views. 1.2 million likes. Celebrity shoutouts. And yes, real foot traffic.
This wasn’t an agency-polished production. It was funny, scrappy, and human. AI didn’t replace creativity. It amplified it. The spark was humor. AI just made it faster and louder.
The formula is simple:
Don’t overproduce.
Let AI accelerate the spark, not create it.
Forget the budget excuse. The only real limit now is imagination.
Stories like this prove that AI in the right hands isn’t a gimmick. It is pure amplification of creativity at scale.
Now, after celebrating this fun, let’s go back to our usual show: how AI transforms marketing teams and their work, right now.
Peter & Torsten
A quick word from this week’s sponsor:
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AI Has a Favorite Author. And It's Not You.
A peer-reviewed PNAS study found that autonomous AI agents systematically prefer AI-generated communications over human ones across tasks like product selection and content evaluation.
It isn't about style. It’s about patterns. AI-generated text is structured, dense with predictable information, and follows the linguistic models the agents were trained on. To an AI, human prose is a beautiful but inefficient poem. AI text is a perfectly structured dataset.
The new imperative is Agent Optimization (AO). As consumers delegate research and comparison tasks to autonomous AI agents, the primary audience for much of your bottom-funnel content is no longer a person. It’s a machine acting on their behalf.
Why it matters for marketing leaders
Satisfying a machine's logic is becoming just as important as catching a human's eye. If your product descriptions and knowledge bases aren't perfectly structured for an AI to parse and rank, you’re invisible to the next wave of commerce.
The agent won't "discover" your product. It will filter it out for lacking the right data patterns. Your content library is no longer a collection of articles. It's a training dataset for the world's AIs.
What to do next?
» Pilot an ‘Agent Optimization’ sprint. Task a team with rewriting the product descriptions for a key product line using generative AI. Focus on clarity, structure, and data density. See how they perform in Google’s AI Overviews versus your human-written copy.
» Audit your content for machine readability. Use schema and other metadata to explicitly label information so an AI agent doesn't have to guess.
» Brief your teams on a dual audience. Your writers now have to be bilingual. They need to craft content that is compelling for humans and perfectly structured for machines. This is the new skill to hire for.
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The community is for marketing, creative, and growth leaders only. It’s paid and it’s invite-only. Founding members can apply now to join the waitlist.
As a founding member, you can unlock lifetime discounted membership fees. Space for founding members is limited to 28 (only 9 left as of Aug 19th).
The community will launch on September 1.
Your Chatbot Is a PR Crisis Waiting to Happen.
Last week, Meta found itself facing an investigation after reports that its AI chatbot was having inappropriate, “sensual” conversations with users posing as minors.
It’s a textbook case of guardrails failing and turning a customer tool into a brand's worst nightmare. Regardless of eventual findings, the headline risk is now obvious: consumer-facing AI can generate reputational and compliance crises overnight.
On the tools side, Roblox open-sourced Sentinel, an AI model that flags grooming/abnormal chat patterns across ~6B daily messages. It’s a pattern-level approach (conversation context, not just keywords) and is meant to be reused by others.
Hopefully, these shared baselines for moderation will spread quickly across consumer platforms, games, and any brand with real-time chat or UGC.
Why it matters for marketing leaders
Every public-facing AI you deploy is an extension of your brand. Without obsessive testing and iron-clad guardrails, you are handing a live microphone to an unpredictable algorithm.
The reputational risk is off the charts. A single viral screenshot of your chatbot saying something offensive can undo years of brand-building. Brand safety isn't just about ad placements anymore; it’s about controlling the behavior of the AI that wears your logo.
What to do next?
» Mandate a ‘Red Team’ audit, now. Instruct a dedicated team to try to break your customer-facing AI actively. Their goal is to provoke off-brand or harmful responses. Find your vulnerabilities before your customers do.
» Review and document your AI guardrails. What topics are forbidden? What are the escalation paths for sensitive issues? This shouldn't be an afterthought; it’s a core part of the deployment checklist.
» Draft a public-facing AI Ethics statement. A simple one-page document explaining your commitment to safety builds trust and provides a framework for your teams. Get ahead of the conversation before a crisis forces you to.
AI Tool Of The Week: Blaze AI
We’ve been testing faster ways to spin up campaigns end-to-end, and Blaze AI is quickly becoming a go-to.
It’s not just another “AI content tool.” Blaze combines strategy, execution, and distribution in one workflow: generate copy, build assets, schedule posts, and track performance, without bouncing between half a dozen apps.
For lean marketing teams, it feels like adding a growth operator on demand. Set goals, provide context, and Blaze takes care of the heavy lifting, allowing you to focus on steering.
Your Next Video Edit Is a Doodle.
The distance between a creative idea and the final cut just vanished. Video generation platform Higgsfield unveiled a feature that lets users edit videos simply by drawing on them. Want to change a shirt from blue to red? Circle the shirt and type "change to red." Need to add birds to a sky? Scribble where you want them.
This "draw-to-edit" interface turns locked footage into a dynamic canvas. It removes the technical barrier of traditional editing software and collapses the feedback loop. An art director can now provide feedback by marking up a frame instead of writing a long email with time-stamped notes.
Video creation is suddenly as agile and iterative as graphic design. The ability to instantly test visual ideas without a VFX specialist on call changes the game for any team producing video at scale.
Why it matters for marketing leaders
Video has always been your most expensive and time-consuming content format. This innovation flips the economics of post-production, lowering the cost and time required to experiment.
Imagine A/B testing a dozen product colors in an ad, or updating a demo video with a new UI, all in minutes. Stop thinking about video as a finished product. It's now a flexible, mutable asset.
What to do next?
» Run a ‘Creative Refresh’ sprint. Task your team to take a high-performing video and use a tool like Higgsfield to create three distinct visual variations in one afternoon.
» Evolve your briefing process. Build "post-production pivot points" into your creative briefs. Ask: "What are three ways we could visually remix this scene after the shoot?"
» Reallocate a portion of your freelance budget. Shift funds from traditional post-production hours to licenses for AI-native creative tools. Empower your in-house team to do the iterative work.
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The Great Talent Split: Hire for Craft or Hire for Reach?
Two conflicting visions for your next hire emerged this week. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is convinced that as AI buries us in average content, truly human-made work will "go up in value dramatically." He’s betting on a future where premium, authentic creative commands a massive price tag because it's rare.
Meanwhile, Figma CEO Dylan Field says AI is empowering "generalist behavior." He sees AI breaking down the walls between disciplines, allowing one person to do the work of a team of specialists—from coding to design to video. This creates the AI-augmented generalist, who can orchestrate entire workflows and produce at scale.
So which way do you go? The answer is both, and it splits your org chart in two.
Why it matters for marketing leaders
Your org chart for 2026 needs to accommodate both archetypes. Your premium brand work—the things that build deep trust and emotional connection—will fall to the human-centric craftspeople.
But the vast majority of your marketing execution—social posts, ad variations, sales enablement—will become the domain of the AI-powered generalist. If you only hire for one, you’ll either lack a soul or you’ll lack scale.
What to do next?
» Segment your hiring strategy. Define which roles require deep, human craft (Brand Storyteller) and which require AI orchestration skills (Growth Orchestrator).
» Rewrite one job description. Take a current "Marketing Manager" role and re-post it as an "AI-Augmented Marketing Orchestrator." Replace "excellent writer" with "expert in prompting, curating, and refining AI-generated content at scale."
» Create a ‘Center of Craft.’ Designate a small, protected team whose KPI is not volume, but creative excellence. Their job is to create the ‘human’ assets that your AI-driven engine will amplify.
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Comet - The First Fully AI-Powered Browser.
We were part of the Business Fellowship from Perplexity, which has now ended. But before it wrapped, they gave us one last workshop on Comet. I (Peter) am still using Comet as my default browser. We’ve written about the AI-driven, newly kicked-in browser wars, and this workshop confirmed it’s not hype, it’s happening.
Here are 10 takeaways from the session:
Comet = Browser + AI assistant. Built on Chromium, but with an AI “sidecar” for contextual tasks and a summarizer button. Think Chrome with a built-in chief of staff.
Context awareness. Comet doesn’t just Google things—it sees what tabs you have open and uses that context in its answers and comparisons. Less re-explaining, more actual work.
Agentic workflows. You can chain tasks together: research → draft a doc → email someone → schedule a meeting. It’s admin automation on steroids.
Personalization. Comet remembers your style and tone over time. You can also create your own shortcuts (like /factcheck or /dupe) to automate repetitive prompts.
Enterprise security theater. SOC 2 Type 2 compliance, configurable retention, audit logs, DNS rules respected, and strong claims about not training on enterprise data. In other words: “Please don’t block us, IT department.”
Practical use cases. In the demo, Comet was put through everyday workflows: drafting first versions of video descriptions, comparing vendors like Ramp and Brex, scheduling meetings, handling email replies, creating project tickets in Linear, notifying teammates in Slack, helping with online shopping, and even planning a restaurant date. It’s not abstract—it showed how the browser can step into the flow of work directly.
Memory + customization. It builds a memory of your preferences. If you prefer emails in plain English over jargon, this approach maintains that tone.
Parallel tasking. Comet can run multiple tasks in parallel across tabs—like having five interns working at once, but faster and with fewer excuses.
Built-in extras. Default ad-blocker, Slack summarization, and daily prep widgets that digest your calendar and tasks in one click.
The philosophy. There’s no “perfect prompt.” Comet works best if you treat it like an intern: give it a clear goal, the right context, specific steps, and a desired output format. That’s how you get usable results.
Bottom line:
Comet is positioning itself as the AI-first browser in the new wave of browser wars. The pitch is simple: let the machine handle admin and grunt work, while you focus on decisions and creativity. You can watch the entire workshop here.
CMO Tips: Lightweight Governance for AI
Governance isn’t about slowing your team down. It’s about keeping speed without losing control. Most CMOs overcomplicate it. You don’t need a 50-page policy. You need a few smart layers.
Here’s where to start:
Access control first
Define who can use what. Example: SDRs can draft with AI, but not send the final copy. Keeps you safe without killing velocity.Prompt Q&A built in
Every output should pass three checks: Is it accurate? On brand? Clear? Treat this as a simple QA gate, not a bottleneck.Approval loops where it matters
Not everything needs sign-off. But key assets—like blog posts or campaign copy—should route through a content lead before going live.Logging & review as insurance
Audit prompts monthly. See what’s working, what’s off-brand, and where risks are creeping in. Small discipline, big safety net.
Bottom line: governance is like an operating manual for AI. Done right, it doesn’t block velocity—it accelerates it. Start with one or two layers. Add more only as risk and scale increase.
We teach tactics like this for CMOs in our community.
Want to get it? It’s application & invite-only.
Rapid-Fire News
Small Headlines. Big Shifts.
» Don't Hold Your Breath for Agentic Shopping?
Pinterest CEO Bill Ready says a truly seamless AI shopping agent is still "a long way out." Maybe, but remember Pinterest is under existential threat from AI-generated “slop,” so this might be wishful thinking.
» Salesforce Ups the Agent Game.
The new CoAct-1 agent from Salesforce goes beyond simple automation, writing its code to complete complex office tasks. Agents are shifting their focus from "doing tasks" to "solving problems."
» The Robots Are Coming for the C-Suite.
Google’s ex-Chief Business Officer, Mo Gawdat, called the idea that AI will be a net job creator "100% crap," warning that even CEOs aren't safe. The message is clear: adapt or become obsolete.
» Grok 4 Is Now Free.
In a clear shot at OpenAI, Elon Musk has made Grok 4 free for all users. The commoditization of foundation models is accelerating. The new battleground is application and user experience, not raw access.
» Your Kid's Next Teddy Bear is a Chatbot.
Multiple companies are selling AI-powered plushies for kids. It’s a new frontier for interactive branding—and a massive privacy and safety headache in the making.
This week made one thing clear:
AI is no longer just an assistant. It’s an audience, a gatekeeper, and a risk surface.
Agents are deciding which products get through.
Chatbots can turn into PR crises overnight.
Governance is now a growth strategy, not a compliance box.
The leaders winning with AI aren’t adding tools. They’re rewriting how work gets done, optimizing for machines and humans, while protecting their brand at the same time.
That’s the playbook.
— Peter & Torsten
» PS: Our community for AI-Ready CMOs is open for applications. We still have 9 places left for Founding Members.
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